There’s something about a brush with mortality that can change a person, rearrange priorities, deepen faith, strengthen bonds, bring perspective and focus into areas that otherwise might have been blurred by hubris or self-absorption.

Ted Jackson/The Times-PicayuneNew Orleans Hornets Coach Monty Williams was introduced Tuesday at a press conference at the New Orleans Arena. He became the youngest coach in the NBA.

For Tavares Montgomery Williams Jr., the day of reckoning came just before the start of his sophomore season at Notre Dame when doctors told Williams he had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a thickening of the left ventricle of the heart, the same disease pathologists discovered killed Loyola-Marymount star Hank Gathers earlier that year. Gathers collapsed and died on the basketball court March 4, 1990, during the first half of a West Coast Conference Tournament quarterfinal game against Portland.

Words ordinarily reserved for older, less vibrant individuals who might not be in the peak condition Williams was, not for a young man whose dreams of playing professionally were dissolving into the mist of his private tears.

“That was his life. He grew up playing basketball; it was the thing he did, ” said Ingrid Montgomery, Monty’s wife of 15 years, who at the time of his HCM diagnosis and the grim prognosis and resulting prescription, was his steady girlfriend. “He was one of the best. It was a sad time. A disappointing time. A scary time. You don’t know what’s going to happen.

“Especially after Hank Gathers. It was a big scare at the time. Certainly, it would affect anyone who was 19 or 20 years old, talking about heart attacks. It affected him. It sure did.”

Monty, already a devout Christian, embraced his faith even more. He and Ingrid, she recalls, spent hours at Notre Dame in introspective prayer, walking around the campus in the shadows of the Golden Dome and “Touchdown Jesus,” kneeling and praying at the Notre Dame Grotto. The grotto is a shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes, referring to the apparition of Mary, the mother of Jesus, that had appeared to Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old peasant girl from Lourdes, France, in 1858, where subsequently those who drank or bathed in the waters of a spring described by Bernadette claimed to be cured of various diseases.

For two years, the couple prayed fervently.

The anger Monty initially felt at having something so close to him, basketball, being taken away so suddenly, would in due course fade into the resolve of becoming a better man.

“Whenever you’re trying to believe and hope for a miracle, it’s the kind of thing you have to build up to, ” said Ingrid. “We spent a lot of time praying, at that grotto, hoping and praying there’d be a miracle and he would be able to play again.”

Williams had never had any HCM symptoms, no fainting, no chest pains.

In 1992, physicians put Williams through a battery of cardiac examinations and found no heart disease, no trace of HCM.

The Williamses believe the reversal of Monty’s heart abnormality is a miracle.

“I mean how else can the doctors tell you one minute that if you keep playing you’re going to die, and then two years later, you go have the most extensive testing you can have done on your heart, and they say they can’t find anything wrong, ” said Williams. “The Bible says ’Have the elders of the church lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.’ The Bible says ’By Jesus’ stripes, we are healed.’ ”

TRANSITIONING TO THE BENCH

Strengthened, and healed, by faith, Williams went on to complete his career at Notre Dame. In 1994, he was drafted in the first round by the New York Knicks, where he would play for Pat Riley and Jeff Van Gundy. Williams went on to a nine-year career in the NBA with five teams before a knee injury sent him to the bench and into his future: coaching.

As his playing career was about to end with Orlando, where Williams was playing for Doc Rivers, Rivers said he told Williams one day he’d be a coach in the NBA as a way of softening an impending transaction.

“Monty is one of the few players that I played with and coached, ” Rivers said. “It makes you feel 1,000 years old. I told him he was going to coach some day because I was about to cut him soon as a player. Now he’s coaching and is a head coach. He’ll be a very, very good head coach.”

Sentiments echoed by San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich, for whom Williams played three years. Popovich also gave Williams his first coaching job.

“As a player, ” Popovich said, “he was very coachable. I think most coaches were probably coachable when they played at whatever level they might be. He really understood direction and the thing we tried to do program-wise or system-wise, he had no problem with. He picked things up very quickly and he understood. That was the first clue.

“As you get to know him, you realize he’s got a very high intelligence level and he handled himself really well as far as not getting too high or too low. He really had a good demeanor about him. It was impressive.”

But what convinced Popovich of Williams’ future most of all, Popovich said, was a conversation the pair had when it became obvious Williams’ time as a player with the Spurs was nearing its end.

“I knew he understood the deal when we finally did not re-sign him, ” Popovich said. “And I told him, ’You know, Tim Duncan, he’s so good he’s going to get double-teamed every time he touches the ball. And we need to surround him with guys who can shoot it. Monty, that’s not you. You’re a slasher, you’re a defender. You do a great job, but I’ve got to go get some shooters. So we’re not going to re-sign you.’

“He understood completely. He said, ’I want to be here, but I understand what you’re doing.’ He knew how teams fit based on your personnel. You’ve got to do different things. I knew at that point that was somebody that some day I wanted to get back in the program when he wasn’t playing anymore. Because he knew. That’s what we did. We had an opportunity to bring him back on the staff, we did it. We were anxious to get him back in the program. And you always target people like that. You always see people you know you want to bring back in your program someday.”

Williams served a one-year apprenticeship with the Spurs, who won the championship that 2004-05 season against Larry Brown’s Detroit Pistons, San Antonio’s third of four NBA titles.

BLAZING A TRAIL IN PORTLAND

From there, Williams joined the troubled Portland Trail Blazers, where Nate McMillan had been hired to turn around a franchise riddled with off-court problems that earned the team the nickname “Jail Blazers.”

“There were a lot of things going on with this organization, a lot of negative things, ” McMillan said. “Some of the things Monty was doing at that time was just talking to guys like Zach Randolph, for example. Darius Miles. If something went wrong during the day, and there was maybe some words during the day between me and some of the players, Monty found himself over at Zach’s house that evening just trying to communicate the message we were trying to get across. We both believe in the same thing in that you’re going to play the game hard, you’re going to respect the game, you’re going to respect the fans, you’re going to respect the organization you work for. We’re not going to settle for anything less than that.

“And a lot of this was not something I told him to do. He just felt that was needed. On his own. He did a great job of just assisting and being able to communicate and getting these guys to understand not only what we wanted from them on the floor, but what we wanted from them off the floor.”

In the five seasons Montgomery and McMillan worked together in Portland, the Trail Blazers not only burnished their off-court image but again became a vibrant, Western Conference playoff contender.

“This is a very difficult league, ” McMillan said. “I think he understands what needs to be done, and he has prepared himself for this opportunity. Part of what was attractive to me was he’d played and coached with Popovich and he played with Pat Riley. He’s played in a number of systems or (for) coaches who’ve been successful. Monty has all that information with him. He has the systems, the plays, the philosophy. He’s constantly educating himself and learning.

“I could see a play on ESPN, a college team that had a real nice play or executed a nice play, and I knew Monty wrote it down. The next morning sure enough, he comes in with the play and he had it. We do things like that, but he’s constantly learning and was preparing himself for this opportunity. He had his notebooks of philosophies and teams and coaches and coaching styles and all of that. He’s going to do well. He’s going to get the guys to play hard for him and he has a good mind. He had to work his way through the NBA. He’ll have to do that as a coach also.”

’SO SPECIAL’

Working on a personal relationship, Williams’ wife Ingrid recalled, was easier.

The two met at a minority student mixer at Notre Dame their freshman year and Ingrid Lacy, a diminutive 5-foot-4 coed, admits while it was not love at first sight, she was extremely intrigued by the 6-8, effervescent man who stood before her. And their Spartan dating rituals gave them time to explore their friendship.

“Back then, ” said Ingrid, “we didn’t have money to date. We’d spend our evenings when we’d have time off from school and we laugh about it now: We’d have anywhere between $6 to $8 to spend. That’s when you could get a Papa John’s pizza for maybe $5.99. We’d get a cheese pizza then go down to the vending machine and get two sodas and a bag of corn nuts.

“We’d sit and eat the pizza and drink the soda and watch whatever was on TV, whatever we could get on campus. That would be our date night. We spent most of our dating time in college doing that. But we had fun.”

On July 21, Monty and Ingrid will celebrate their 15th anniversary. Baby No. 5 - a second son - will join sisters Lael (12), Faith (10), Janna (8), and brother Elijah (2 ½ ) in the next few weeks in their new home, New Orleans.

“I tell people now we’ll have a team, ” Ingrid said, “five players. We have a coach. And I’m the referee.”

And the Hornets will have a new leader, who, former coaches say, is as prepared as anyone for the grind of being an NBA coach, someone who is well-grounded, principled and thorough.

“I was impressed from Day One about what he stood for, ” Van Gundy said. “You could tell he was a serious guy who had serious goals. He was a pro from Day One. No one had to teach him how to be a pro.”

Brushes with mortality can mature young people rather quickly, a trait those closest to Monty Williams have noticed.

“It did help him become, to whatever extent, more introspective about his life and his family and what was important and being able to prioritize, ” Popovich said. “But he’s always been a contemplative person. I talked to him a lot when he was here about politics, religion, things that had nothing to do with basketball.

“He’s got a real wide breadth about him intellectually and it makes him an interesting individual. I think the heart problem probably had something to do with that. It made him think about what is really important to him and what gives him satisfaction. That’s what helps him be so special.”